You had to be at the spectator end of the TV set during the 1960s to really appreciate what the space program was about. It was the U.S. against the Russians. Which country was going to put a man on the moon? It was high drama. A Saturn booster launch sending an Apollo spaceship to the moon was like the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards combined. People set their alarm clocks to wake them up at 3 a.m. so they could watch a key event on live TV.

The space race began on October 4, 1957, when the Russians sent Sputnik into orbit. It shocked most Americans. The United States was supposed to be the unchallenged leader in science and technology. Now, a Russian satellite was flying overhead every few hours impervious to any challenge.

People demanded to know how it could happen. They were worried about Russia’s ability to orbit missiles in space. President Dwight Eisenhower remained calm in the eye of the storm. He assured the public there was no military threat. That didn’t tell the whole story.

John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960. In May 1961 he announced that the United States would put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Kennedy believed the Cold War was being fought on a psychological battleground, and the United States was losing. The Russians had orbited a satellite carrying a dog. Then, they orbited a cosmonaut.

Kennedy shifted the paradigm to a race to the moon. His top scientific advisors didn’t like the idea. They weren’t sure the U.S. would win. They said the odds were 50/50. That was good enough for Kennedy. He believed the space race was a “hearts and minds” issue that would define which political system worked best. He knew the whole world would be watching.

Sixteen months later, Kennedy was speaking at Rice University about the space race. He explained the mission by asking some rhetorical questions. “Why climb the highest mountain?” “Why did (Charles Lindbergh) fly across the Atlantic Ocean?” “Why does Rice play Texas (football)?”

Many years later, NASA officials rationalized the space race by citing the value of Teflon and other discoveries which reaped medical knowledge and consumer products. But there were no doubts in 1961. The United States entered the space race to win. The astronauts were larger than life heroes seen through the filter of the TV screen. John Glenn eventually became a senator. Neil Armstrong made an indelible impression when he set foot on the moon, and said, “One small step for man, and one giant step for mankind.”

There was something magical about NASA. The public trusted the space agency implicitly. The astronauts seemed invincible. The public expected every mission to have a happy ending. Success was so predictable that interest was waning. By the Spring of 1970, the public was distracted by the war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon was president, and NASA’s budget was being trimmed.

Bob Gilruth, the director of NASA’s Manned Space Center, was privately calling for the end of manned space flights. He reasoned we had been to the moon twice. Why risk a tragic accident which could be devastating for NASA?

Apollo 13 was launched on April 13, 1970. The astronauts were Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. Two days into the mission, Swigert flipped a switch and a dull bang resounded through the space vehicle. An alarm rang. MAIN B UNDERVOLT glowed red on the instrument panel.

“Houston, we have a problem,” Lovell said. His voice was calm.

“Roger, Main B Undervolt. Okay. Standby 13. We are looking at it,” replied a voice a Mission Control, in Houston.

It was quickly determined that one of the two main oxygen tanks had exploded. Subsequent investigations revealed that a component made by a minor contractor didn’t comply with specifications. NASA paid a giant price for that small deviation. The moon landing was aborted. Houston calculated that there was sufficient oxygen remaining to sustain the three astronauts for 45 hours. The problem was that it would take them 90 hours to return to Earth.

Now, 25 years later, Apollo 13 is a motion picture, directed by Ron Howard, who was Opie on The Andy Griffith Show when the space race was getting underway. He was a teenage star on Happy Days while NASA was sending astronauts into space. His feature film credits as a director include Splash, Cocoon, Willow, Parenthood, Backdraft and Far and Away. All of those films were made with his friend and partner at Imagine Entertainment, producer Brian Grazer. Apollo 13 was different. It was based on a real event that probably half of the people living in the U.S. today watched on live TV. Millions of them still have memories of the Apollo 13 mission. Millions of others have seen the incident in documentary footage. The space aficionados in the hard core audience for Apollo 13 will bring their memories and expectations to the theater.

Howard assembled a formidable cast, including Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Kathleen Quinlan, Gary Sinise and Ed Harris. To translate the reality-based drama into moving images captured on film, he chose cinematographer Dean Cundey, ASC. Cundey’s credits during recent years include The Flintstones, Hook, Death Becomes Her, Jurassic Park, The Back to the Future trilogy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He had just completed principal photography on Casper. He intended to direct and shoot commercials while waiting for the right script. It came a lot quicker than he anticipated.

“I was a fan of the space program. I remember a school project where I built a model of The Explorer, the American answer to Sputnik,” he says.

Cundey grew up in Alhambra on the outskirts of Los Angeles. One of his hobbies in elementary school was building miniature sets and creating imaginary worlds filled with make believe actors and actresses. In high school, he discovered American Cinematographer Magazine and became an avid fan.

Cundey enrolled at UCLA, where he studied architecture and cinema. James Wong Howe, ASC, was teaching cinematography while he was preparing to shoot The Molly McGuires. Cundey has vivid memories of Howe using light and shadows on a bare three-wall set to create every imaginable setting and mood. “That’s when I started thinking about becoming a cinematographer,” Cundey reminisces. “Jimmy said that as he got older, he learned to simplify by using less light and equipment. That made a lasting impression.”

After graduation, Cundey scrambled for several years doing pickup shots and inserts, and assisting editors who were cutting low budget features. He scraped together enough money to outfit a small van with a camera, some lenses and lighting equipment. Cundey rented the van to low budget film producers, and he was usually part of the package. At first, he worked as a gaffer or technician. Cundey finally got a chance to shoot when a cinematographer scheduled to work on a film canceled at the last moment.

Initially, Cundey worked on horror genre flicks with minuscule budgets. His breakthrough film was Halloween, directed by John Carpenter. It led to opportunities to shoot Escape from New York, Romancing the Stone and Big Business. Cundey earned an Oscar nomination for Roger Rabbit. That film put him on the map as someone who could handle films with high-tech effects.

During their first talks, Howard and Cundey focused on how they were going to deal with the fact that so many people have specific memories of the space program. They studied hours of vintage TV programs. It brought back memories. The original TV transmissions from Apollo missions were very low resolution video seen through the eye of a wide angle lenses. The cameras were positioned in the corners of the capsules, or they were handheld.

Howard and Cundey decided that they didn’t want Apollo 13 to look like a documentary. But they wanted it to feel realistic. The inside of the capsule was meticulously authentic. Many of the switches, dials, buttons and similar components came from Apollo capsules.

Cundey estimates that a third to half of the story occurs on Apollo 13.

“It’s a very small and confined space,” he says, “and we agreed that it was important not to violate the fourth wall. The camera always had to feel like it was inside the capsule. There is a subconscious expectation of reality in many people’s minds. We decided to keep the camera moving if only slightly. The lighting inside the capsule came from realistic sources. The capsule was always moving and rotating. They called it the barbecue roll. The rotation was designed to keep the skin of the capsule evenly heated. The sunlight coming through the windows would dance across the faces and bodies of the astronauts, light the back wall, and then it would go dark. We emulated that look.”

Other scenes are staged at Mission Control, and also in establishing the identities of the astronauts in their lives on Earth. Their relationships with their families and friends, the people at Mission Control and the other astronauts are all threads in the fabric of the story. That’s what makes the audience care whether Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise live or die.           

Lovell was the official advisor to the filmmakers. He was there most of the time during pre-production and the early shooting. Cundey says that Lovell provided more than background. His insights helped him to understand how the astronauts felt. His memories are precise down to the smallest details.

“One day we were getting ready to shoot a scene in a mockup capsule,” Cundey recalls. “I can picture Jim explaining to the actors, Ron and myself, exactly what happened. Every detail of each procedure was etched in his memory. He described how they got on and off the couches, and into the tunnel which linked the main capsule with the lunar module. He described how they accessed various parts of the capsule. By the end of that day, the actors knew exactly what the astronauts did, and what was in their minds.”

When Lovell wasn’t available, Dave Scott, an astronaut from Apollo 14, who rode the lunar rover on the moon, was there to advise Howard and the actors about which switches would have been thrown at any particular moment. Every procedure depicted in the film is accurate. Howard insisted on that.

“It was like shooting a movie about three guys in a Volkswagen,” says Cundey. “I don’t recall the exact dimensions of the capsule set. It was just wide enough for three guys to sit side by side and be barely comfortable. The space was so confined in the actual capsule that in order to move around efficiently, you had to be weightless. That was the only way you could crawl in and out of the seats, and get to the back where the equipment was stowed.”

Cundey explains that because of the damage, the astronauts could only use 12 amps of power. There wasn’t enough electricity to continuously operate the computer that was the key to getting back home.

“Ron wanted the audience to understand the incredible odds that Lovell, Swigert and Haise had to overcome to survive,” he says. “It was a triumph of the human spirit over the failure of technology. The key was the performances by Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton. It’s more than a vivid recreation of reality. They make the audience empathize with the characters they portrayed.”

Howard wanted to draw the audience into the story as though they were invisible actors witnessing a historic drama unfold. Though billions of people had seen the event on TV, most of the details were never made public. The Apollo 13 mission was generally perceived as a failure.

“Those guys were heroic,” says Cundey. “It was an amazing feat. Everyone assumed the technology was infallible. They proved that their courage and ingenuity, and the resourcefulness of the people at Mission Control, was what mattered. The triumph is that they survived.”

Among the first decisions that Howard and Cundey made was to record the images in Super 35 format. Cundey explains that they parsed the script visually and realized there were many scenes where the audience would be looking at the astronauts lined up in a row. It was important to show how they related and reacted to each other within the environment of the confined space.

“Rather than cutting from two shots to singles, Ron wanted to play a lot of those moments with all three astronauts on the screen. He also wanted the audience to feel how small Apollo was compared to the infinite expanse of outer space in exteriors scenes. Those considerations defined the need for a wide screen image. At first, we considered shooting in anamorphic format. But, I wanted to use spherical lenses, partially for depth of field. More importantly, there are scenes where I wanted to be in sharp focus with the lens only inches away from a character without violating the fourth wall and getting too far away with the camera. I don’t think we were ever more than two or three feet away from the actors. It’s very intimate.”

Cundey initially felt a certain amount of trepidation about shooting in Super 35 format. It requires making an optical blow up by extracting a comparatively small portion of the image area. He was concerned about whether that would degrade the quality of the images. Cundey decided to speak with people who had worked recently with the Super 35 format.

The clincher was True Lies. Cundey spoke with people at Digital Domain, who handled the visual effects. Russ Carpenter shot the feature in Super 35 format, which is generally director Jim Cameron’s preference. Digital Domain toldCundey that some of the plate work had to be photographed in VistaVision format, but most of the optical elements were recorded in four perf Super 35.        

“I was very impressed with the quality of the release prints,” he says. “People generally shoot tests and look at work prints. The problem with that is that by the time the film goes through all of the duping to get release prints, the image is several generations removed from the workprint. You are bound to be disappointed. I also looked at Philippe Rousselot’s work in Super 35 format in Interview With A Vampire. It was stunning. We shot some Super 35 tests and took them through release printing. I was very pleased. A lot of this has to do with improvements in raw stocks. There is much less grain and truer colors.”

Cundey also lauded improvements in the Eastman EXR 5244 color intermediate film, which recently earned a technical Oscar for Kodak.

Most of Apollo 13 was filmed on stages at Universal Studios with some exteriors shot around Los Angeles. Digital Domain created exterior scenes in deep space using large scale miniatures and digitally compositing other picture elements. Cundey spent some time at the visual effects facility helping to ensure the continuity of the look, and also to educate himself.

He says there were some interesting challenges. The Saturn V rocket, which carried Apollo 13 to its destiny in space doesn’t exist anymore except for one lying on its side for display purposes. NASA shot miles of film documenting every launch. Howard planned to cull scenes for use in the film. However, he discovered that there wasn’t much of a useable film library. A lot of the footage focused on specific things, such as the engines firing, cables unhooking, and the film was exposed at high speeds. The engineers and scientists reviewed the film and either shelved or disposed of it.

The solution: Digital Domain simulated the launching of Apollo 13. They built an 18 foot high model of a Saturn V rocket and a gantry. They filmed the model and composited it with images of flames, steam, smoke and falling ice to recreate a believable Saturn launch. There is also a visual effects scene inside the assembly building showing the astronauts as small figures on the gantry next to a giant rocket. In addition, there are sequences in space looking at the capsule, and others of the command and lunar modules coming at the audience and orbiting away. Digital Domain also created images of the exploding oxygen tank, and the slingshot ride that the module took around the moon on its way home to Earth. There is an exterior scene of the space vehicle orbiting the dark side of the moon. All of that visual effects footage has to mesh seamlessly with Cundey’s live-action film to create a credible illusion.

A lot of the magic occurred while Cundey was shooting scenes on the capsule sets. How do you make the audience believe they are witnessing the astronauts hurtling through space on the way to the moon? Part of the difficulty was that illusion had to be sustained through a large part of the picture. Cundey elected to light the capsule realistically from apparent practical sources. These were small fluorescent bulbs built into the practical units on the set. Cundey varied the fluorescent bulbs based on the colors. A blue-green light was used in practicals, and a more white fluorescent on the instrumentation panels.

“The sunlight coming through the windows was another main source of light, especially after they begin to shut down all the power to save the batteries,” Cundey says. “At that point, there is no interior source lighting. The sunlight is very directional and harsh. It bounces around the capsule giving us a bit of ambient fill on the shadow sides of faces.”

Cundey created the illusion with a programmable Cyberlight, which would more typically be used during rock concerts. He explains that the bulb is Xenon, and a mirror is used to direct the beam of light on a programmable moving path. The lamp was on a crane arm. An operator moved the light up and down and back and forth, and the computer kept the beam aimed through the window. Cundey was able to direct this shaft of sunlight to any part of the capsule. It was programmed to move at a consistent speed and angle so footage from different takes intercuts perfectly.

“It feels like direct sunlight, and we had very precise control over what was lit and what was dark,” he says. “We created some very interesting looks with silhouettes of characters, and you always have a sense that the light is coming through a window from the sun.”

In addition to the moving shaft of sunlight, Cundey used a fiber optics starfield behind the windows to create the illusion of traveling through space.

“We considered building a starfield until we found one,” he says. “It’s a large black velvet backing with little tiny fiber optic plastic leads that poke through the material. It looks like thousands of pinpoints of starlight. It’s a rental property used for stage shows and television programs. We hung it on a pipe that we were able to raise and lower and move it sideways to create the illusion that the capsule was traveling through space.”

Cundey says that one of the main challenges was simulating zero gravity. The traditional way to do this is by floating objects and people on wires and harnesses. One of the problems is that actors who spend a lot of time wearing harnesses are generally uncomfortable. It can affect their performances. Most importantly, Cundey says that it is very difficult to simulate zero gravity.

“We could see what it looked like on the TV images, and Jim Lovell also describe what zero gravity felt like,” he says. “Everything responds to the absence of gravity. Objects floated, including the books and equipment they used, and the astronauts themselves. How do you get the actors floating, feeling comfortable and looking natural? We tested all kinds of things. We shot tests with the actors seated on teeter-totters and we also used wire removal. We tried turning the capsule upside down with the actors rigged in harnesses.” Cundey says those were the most convincing images, but they were too hard on the actors. Their faces turned red because blood was rushing to their heads. Howard decided that while some of that footage would be useful, it wasn’t practical to shoot a third to half of the film upside down.

One of the most difficult scenes was trying to photograph the actors moving from the lunar module to the command module through a small tunnel.

“No matter what we tried, we couldn’t make them look like they were swimming in air through this connecting tunnel,” he says. “It was an essential part of the action. Someone remembered that NASA has an airplane they use for testing weightlessness and for training people in weightless situations.”

The plane had no seats. There was just an open bay. The plane would climb 30,000 feet over the top of a parabola, and then it would dive. There was a 23 second interval when weightlessness occurred and people literally floated. Howard, Hanks, Paxton, Sinise, Bacon and executive producer Todd Hallowell attended a NASA space camp in Houston. They went up on the KC 135 airline, and flew through 40 parabolas in one morning. They learned what it felt like to be weightless, how to move, and how to catch and handle floating objects.

“They had a camcorder, and videotaped their experience,” says Cundey. “When we looked at the tape, it was pretty remarkable to see all those actors sitting on the floor, and then one would levitate and swim through the air.”

Somebody asked, “Is there any way we could build part of the set -- the tunnel, and maybe also a small part of the capsule -- on the airplane? That way, we could at least film parts of the scene in real weightlessness.”

That started a process of getting permission from NASA, which normally only makes the plane available to contractors testing equipment, and legitimate research projects. NASA agreed to let them shoot those scenes on the plane.

“As we were breaking down the sequences, Ron was selecting scenes to shoot on the plane. He kept adding bits and pieces,” Cundey says. “We built a scaled down set, and everyone was surprised that a pretty good piece of it fit on the plane. I don’t think actors have ever been filmed in a weightless environment before. There was nothing to refer to. We improvised.”

Cundey pre-lit the set during a weekend. The plan was to shoot film of actors floating with a second unit crew, while Howard and Cundey kept working on dramatic scenes at the studio. Cundey delegated the second unit work to David Knoll, who shot the aerial footage in Jurassic Park. He also worked with Cundey on a number of other films. In the end, Howard decided to spend several days in Houston with the second unit crew.

“He felt he could get some good performance moments by working with the actors in a weightless environment,” Cundey says. “ Todd (Hallowell) and I were shooting other scenes in Los Angeles. I would go to dailies in the morning and look at Ron’s film, and then I’d phone him and make suggestions. They spent about 10 days in Houston and came back with incredible footage. Ron appealed to management at Universal Studios to give us time to shoot more footage in that weightless environment. He wanted to build part of the lunar module and other sets for shooting on the plane.”

When the studio agreed, the company had to go back to NASA, and get permission to shoot more scenes on the plane. When principal photography wrapped, Howard and the weightless-unit crew, and the actors in the astronaut roles went back to Houston, where they shot a lot more film in a weightless environment.

“The footage is amazing,” says Cundey. “The way objects move in a weightless environment with multi-axis rotations is incomparable. You can’t duplicate that feeling of reality in any other way. I think it’s a major factor in creating an illusion which makes the audience temporarily forget they aren’t watching real people floating around in a tiny capsule in deep space.”

The operator and camera were also weightless. The camera was handheld, but it feels like the ultimate Steadicam shots, Cundey explains. The camera crew would find things to hold on to, and the operator would kind of wedge himself into a solid spot. He was holding the camera with his fingertips. There was always a video tap on the camera, so Howard could see if he was getting what he wanted. After 40 dives, the plane would have to land to re-fuel.

“If there was ever a motivation for getting shots in one take, this was it,” says Cundey. “When they pulled out of the dive, they were at 2Gs, so they had to quickly find a safe spot to sit, and make sure that your arm wasn’t twisted underneath you or something like that. It didn’t take long to learn that you didn’t want to land on some part of the set that was going to cause you pain.”

That didn’t eliminate the need for footage on the sets at the studio. The close-ups and most dialog were filmed there. The plane was too noisy for synch sound, though some of it was looped later. There are also scenes where one of more of the astronauts was strapped in a seat or otherwise immobile. There was no point in shooting those in weightless conditions. The teeter-totters with counterbalances made the actors appear to be what Cundey describes as “neutrally buoyant.” They could kind of push themselves around. They could get up, push themselves down, and act as if they were weightless.

In some of those scenes, the actors were wearing wires which had to be removed in digital postproduction. A conscious effort was made to avoid the use of harnesses. Cundey says that it generally didn’t look as realistic as true weightlessness, and the process of “painting” out the harness isn’t inexpensive.

“We used the new Panavision color video assist throughout the picture,” Cundey says. “It was a great help because so much occurs in the capsule, and we were lucky to get a camera and operator in there, let alone anybody else. We had to evaluate everything off of the video tap. It became a crucial tool. There were two complete capsule sets, and we had a second unit setting up smaller shots which made important story points. A hand on a switch. A light going off. Things like that. Ron wanted to spend his time with the actors. So, they would run the second unit video tap over to him on the other stage, and he basically directed the second unit off of the color tapes.”

Cundey shot most of Apollo 13 with 20mm and 35mm PRIMO lenses, which enabled him to show the astronauts in their environment. It also replicated the dimensions of the look people remembered on TV. For close-ups, he usually chose a 75mm PRIMO lens.

“So much of what we remember seeing transmitted back from space were degraded images compared to the rest of the news,” Cundey says. “There was an obvious difference between those images and everything else. The images from the capsule were more contrasty, darker and noisier than newsfilm, or the live shots of the anchors. We discussed degrading the image inside the capsule. We shot tests with (Eastman EXR) 5296, 5298 and 5293, and ‘pushing’ them by one or two stops. Unfortunately, we couldn’t make it look bad enough. No offense to Kodak, but it never really quite took on that bad look we wanted.”

Instead, Cundey decided to expose the film at the normal exposure index, and degrade the quality of the image in postproduction by going through two or three generations of duping. Those tests were still underway as this issue went to press. Howard and Cundey were looking for the point where a degraded image replicates reality without becoming a distraction.

“I used 5293 and 5298 in the capsule,” he says. “It’s interesting having all of these different film speeds and color temperatures. You can choose the film that does the best job in each situation. I ended up using a little of everything. There were times when Ron wanted a mobile camera. We used the pitching-lens snorkel camera that allowed us to pan 360 degrees. We were very close to the control panel, and then we panned to the faces. We couldn’t possibly make that kind of physical move with a regular camera in a space that tight. You lose light in the viewing system with the snorkel camera, and the lens only opens up to T- 5.6. In order to hold depth of field, I under-exposed the 5298 film (rated for an exposure index of 500) by a stop, and intercut it with footage that was exposed normally. That’s one of the advantages of having all these different films. You can solve unique problems, and keep a consistent look.”

In most situations, Cundey used a remote camera. He kept it constantly floating and moving very subtly so it wasn’t intrusive. Yet, the audience doesn’t’ feel firmly connected to either the capsule or the astronauts. It is more of a voyeuristic impression of what’s happening.

All of the walls on the capsule sets were wild. They were built with panels on a steel framework. All of the panels were removable. Cundey even sawed portions of the frame away when he had to enter a space from a particular angle or direction. It was easy enough to weld it back together. The camera crane came into the set from every imaginable direction and angle. Sometimes he poked the remote camera into the set from straight overhead. Other times, it came in from the side, or from a very close to the ground angle. That enabled Howard to reveal the entire capsule to the audience. He shows them every nook and cranny, and that makes it seem more confining.

Cundey’s crew invented a handheld technique that they dubbed “zero G cam.” They constructed a nylon web designed to cradle a Panaflex camera. They brought a cable in from overhead, and used a pulley and a counterbalance weight to essentially make the camera weightless. The operator was able to move freely, because the cable was long, and there was kind of a pendulum effect. He could make all kinds of subtle moves.

“I had a great crew,” says Cundey. “The operators were Ray Stella (SOC), Casey Hotchkiss and Steve Tate. Dave Luckenbach handled the Steadicam. The assistants were Clyde Bryan, Larry Davis and Jolanda Wipfli, and the loaders, Steve Sfesku and Trevor Loomis.”

The footage depicting the astronauts’ life on Earth is comparatively less aggressive in terms of camera movement. There are tracking shots with dollies, and occasional longer establishing scenes filmed from the visual perspective of a hovering crane. You can almost feel the tug of gravity.

Every location was lit as realistically as possible. Mission Control, for instance, was lit from overhead with fluorescent sources. That matches the institutional look audiences saw on TV. Scenes in Lovell’s house are motivated by warm practical lights at table lamp level. Cundey notes that the early TV coverage of the space race was in black and white. By Apollo 13, TV news was on 16 mm color positive film. It was kind of desaturated by today’s standards.

Cundey worked closely with production designer Michael Corenblith and set designer Meredith Boswell talking about his wish list for practicals built into the sets. “They built an exact replica of Mission Control,” he says. “The images on the three big video screens were rear projected with light valve projectors. We developed a fairly elaborate setup where all of the computer screens were fed by a central video station where we could play back any of the generated graphs, charts and other images needed at a particular moment, such as the video of the launch. The monitors were interlocked with the camera shutter so we didn’t get roll bar and problems like that. We had two or three former mission controllers who taught the actors who were portraying them their jobs and the techniques to use. The set was so realistic that one of them walked down a hallway to the men’s room , and he was amazed that it wasn’t there.”

The exterior scenes for the tract homes where the astronauts lived were actually filmed in Los Angeles. The company built the Cape Canaveral launch bleachers near an old weapons station in Orange County. They also used several buildings at Rockwell which exuded an aerospace ambiance.

“There is very little color in interiors,” Cundey says. “It’s muted; almost pastel. The astronauts lived in Houston, where the sky was always bright and blue. We recorded brighter colors, and clear, crisp images in exterior scenes.”

It was a wet year in Southern California, but Cundey says all of the exterior shooting days were bright, clear and sunny. The locations could as easily be in Houston or Florida. Exteriors were mainly captured on the ultra-fine grain Eastman EXR 5245 daylight film for a little extra sharpness.

Cundey says that Howard lived up to his reputation.

“He’s very articulate, and is able to express what he wants very clearly, speaking in visual terms,” he says. “Ron is also a genuinely nice guy. That’s important, because it means there isn’t a lot of unnecessary tension on the set. Even with all of the testing and pre-production planning, movies are made when you are on the set or location with the actors. Most films evolve over a period of time. They take on their own life. It’s such a collaborative art that until you get everyone moving in the same direction, you can’t define a cohesive look.”

One of the big concerns in the beginning was how they were going to keep the drama going when the audience knows how the film ends. Cundey says that issue defined itself. It wasn’t whether they got home to Earth. It was how? What were the relationships between the astronauts and Mission Control? How did they overcome the seemingly unsolvable problems?

“It was interesting watching Dave Scott, the astronaut who was one of our technical advisors,” says Cundey. “Ron, would ask him, ‘In this sequence, what would the right procedure have been?’ Dave would answer, ‘Let’s look at the transcripts.’ He checked the transcripts of communication between the astronauts and the Mission Control. Sometimes it was the first time he realized the gravity of the situation. I remember him saying, ‘Gee, these guys were really in trouble. I had no idea.’ That really amplified what Lovell, Swigert and Haise accomplished. We really gained a deeper appreciation of their ingenuity and courage as we came to fully understand how they overcame their peril.”

There is also an underlying human factor in the relationships between the astronauts and their families who were helpless as they tried to survive.

“The wives of test pilots are used to living with guys on the edge,” Cundey says, “but there is an element of fear with every mission. They never know if they are going to come back. Marilyn Lovell was sort of superstitious. She worried that this was Jim’s fourth mission. She thought he was stretching the laws of probability. She worried that it was the 13th Apollo mission, and the 13th hour of the 13th day. There were all of these elements that added to her tension. She demands to know, ‘Why do you have to go?’ He says because he must.”

#